From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

A tabloid is a newspaper with compact page size smaller than broadsheet, although there is no standard for the precise dimensions of the tabloid newspaper format. The term "tabloid journalism", which tends to emphasize topics such as sensational crime stories, astrology, and TV and celebrity gossip is commonly associated with tabloid sized newspapers, though some respected newspapers such as The Independent are in tabloid format, and in the United Kingdom the size is used by nearly all local newspapers. In the United States, it is commonly the format employed by alternative newspapers. As the term tabloid has become synonymous with down-market newspapers in some areas, some small-format papers which claim a higher standard of journalism refer to themselves as compact newspapers instead.

Larger newspapers, traditionally associated with higher-quality journalism, are often called broadsheets, and this designation often remains in common usage even if the newspaper moves to printing on smaller pages, as many have in recent years. Thus the terms tabloid and broadsheet are, in non-technical usage, today more descriptive of a newspaper's market position than its physical size.

The Berliner format used by many prominent European newspapers is sized between the tabloid and the broadsheet. In a newspaper context, the term Berliner is generally used only to describe size, not to refer to other qualities of the publication.